What is the best way to run a support channel?

Community Building

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around the best way to run a support channel in a community, particularly focusing on user engagement and accessibility. nathank highlights the challenge of encouraging users to post in a forum due to fear of appearing uninformed and the complexity of the process, especially for non-technical users. They suggest a chat channel as a more private and approachable alternative, noting the current setup on meta.discourse.org allows anyone to join but may cause issues with user retention and notification clutter. Stephen proposes using a prepopulated private message link as an effective method, which has worked well for their community. nathank asks for examples of where to place such links, and Stephen recommends consistent placement in header links, banners, and intro posts to clearly signpost support options.

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After a long time trying fruitlessly to get my users to use the Contribute > Site feedback category, the addition of Discourse Chat makes me wonder how to set up something more effective.

The problem

I think that the major impediment for folk is not wanting to look dumb on a Forum in perpetuity. And also, for newbies posting on a Forum is a pretty daunting task (us experienced souls forget this). I find this especially so with my relatively non-technical userbase who are pobably having their first online forum experience.

The solution

A channel gives the allure of a more private way to do this. And as a community manager, I love that I can move a chat to the Support (what I’ve renamed my site-feedback category) Category if it needs to be searchable (with the consent of the punters).

But I’m not sure how to do the setup.

:discourse:'s approach

Currently meta.discourse.org has Discourse Meta which allows anyone to join. I’m not so sure I like this as

  1. There is some friction for new users (is it okay to join this?)
  2. Once they have joined, they have to unjoin or mute to stop getting the little blue ‘there is action here’ colour thing
    • currently the UI is tricky for this (hopefully to be improved shortly)
    • many users will just leave it on their channel list

Alternate approach

Have a channel which autojoins @everyone.

  1. Great for accessibility
  2. Terrible for always advertising activity
    • I’m not sure how much this matters with the default Only for mentions

Questions

  • What has worked well for you on this front?
  • Have you got an effective support channel?
  • Are there other approaches that might be more effective?
  • Can I force my @moderators to have notifications on for the support channel (without impersonating them)?
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Have you tried throwing a link in the navigation which opens a prepopulated PM to a support mailbox?

That’s our usual go-to and it’s very effective.

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Where do you put it? And what do you label it as?

I’d love to see an example or two!!

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Historically in header links, banners (for new users) and in any intro posts. Consistency is key, so we would only offer one avenue for support and signpost it as clearly as possible.

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